Sweet Land Stories by E. L. Doctorow Page A

slowly gave it to Brad in bits and pieces, what their investigators had learned about her life before. Never mind that she had tried to tell Brad about her marriages, her life on the road. He never wanted to hear it; he had no curiosity about her—none. She had appeared in Tulsa as a vision, God’s chosen sex partner for him, a fresh and wet and shining virgin with red hair. All those beatings were what he was told, and all those apologies were the way his love for her was hanging on. She would feel sorry for him if she could because he was so wired, such a maniac. It was as if his wildness, his independent choice of life, was being driven from him, as if it was the Devil. It was those parents slowly absorbing him back into their righteousness.
    One day Brad G. Benton appeared at the door to her little studio room when he ordinarily would be at work. She was ruling off a grid on one of her canvases as she had been taught. Brad! she said, smiling, but there was no recognition in his eyes. He kicked the stool out from under her. He broke the easel over his knee, he bashed her canvases against the wall, tore down the drawings she had pinned up there, and then he squeezed tubes of paint into her face as he held her down on the floor. And he began hitting her as she lay there. He punched her face, he punched her in the throat. When he got off her, she could hear his breathing—it was like crying. He stood over her, kicked her in the side, and as suddenly as he had come he was gone.
    She lay there moaning in pain, too frightened and shocked even to get up until she thought of the baby. She dragged herself to the nursery. The Cherokee woman who had heard everything sat beside the crib with her hand over her eyes. But the baby was sleeping peacefully. Jolene washed her face and, wrapping up her Mr. Nipplebee, she took him with her as she dragged herself to a doctor. She was told that she had had her cheek fractured, two broken ribs, contusions of the throat, and a bruised kidney. How did this happen? the doctor asked her. She was afraid to tell him, and, besides, it hurt too much to talk. But the nurse in the office didn’t have to be told. She wrote out the name and address of a women’s shelter and said, Go there right now. I’ll order you a cab. And in that way, with her precious in her arms and only what she wore, Jolene left her marriage.
    She could hardly bear staying at the shelter, where there were these wimpy women looking for her friendship, her companionship. Jolene wouldn’t even go to the group sessions. She stayed by herself and nursed Mr. Nipplebee.
    The shelter gave her the name of a woman lawyer and she put down a retainer. Get me a divorce as fast as you can, she told the lawyer. The money—I don’t care, I’ll take anything they give. I just want out of here and out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. And then she waited, and waited, and nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. This went on for some time. And the next thing Jolene knew, when she was about strapped of her savings account, the lawyer quit on her. She was an older woman who wore pinstripe suits and big loopy bronze earrings. I may be broke, Jolene said to her, but Brad G. Benton has money to burn and I can pay you afterwards out of the alimony or child care.
    You didn’t tell me you had a past including a stretch in juvenile detention, the lawyer said. To say nothing of a previous as yet un-annulled marriage to a convicted drug dealer.
    Jolene was so stunned she didn’t think to ask how the lawyer knew that if she hadn’t told her.
    She was up against a scumbag husband on his own turf, so what could she expect but that there was worse to come, as there was, if he knew all along where she was hiding, and if he knew by first names everyone in town, as he probably did the very police officers who came one morning to arrest her for unlawful kidnapping of her own child, who they took from her arms and drove off in one squad car with Jolene in another as she